Entertainment

Daniela Cicarelli YouTube Ban Lifted

The Daniela Cicarelli story began to get widespread coverage last week, when the fairly tame sex tape led to a YouTube shutdown order. That court order had followed other lawsuits from Cicarelli in 2006. Many people doubted whether the ban would be enforced, but it was: over the weekend, YouTube was blocked in Brazil, most notably by the major telecoms company BrasilTelecom (not all the telecoms companies enforced the ban).

Today, Sao Paulo state Supreme Court Justice Enio Santarelli Zuliani reversed the ban, but warned he could still could reinstate it if YouTube fails to build software that prohibits access to the clip (YouTube promised they would have their copyright protection system in place by the end of 2006, which could have prevented users from reposting it). The announcement came a few hours after Telefonica SA, another major telecoms company, said it had blocked YouTube to its customers, preventing millions of people in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from accessing the site. The judge also asked why the ISPs couldn't just block access to that particular YouTube clip, suggesting that he doesn't totally understand the technicalities involved.

It all seems like a bit of a mess: blocking YouTube made no difference, and actually attracted a lot more attention to the clip. Meanwhile, Google Video has no qualms about permitting this type of content, and still carries both the Cicarelli footage and the controversial Saddam execution video. And even if all the major video sharing sites had been forced to pull the clip, it wouldn't have prevented smaller video sites and thousands of independent blogs from posting it. We're learning pretty quickly that there's really no way to suppress a video once it has appeared online.

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